New Purchasing System for Phoenix Control Systems

An industrial control systems and automation manufacturer with over 150 years of experience in the field of control systems engineering

Phoenix Control Systems (PCS) were using an outdated MS Access-based purchasing system that was poorly supported and couldn't be accessed over the internet.

Managing Director Julie Lawson concluded that “We wanted something bespoke that suited our needs…There’s nothing off the shelf that would work for us.”

In order to meet their requirements PCS enlisted Evergreen’s help.

Evergreen Challenge

To create a bespoke web-based purchasing system with the following features:

The ability to handle purchase orders (POs), order receipting, projects and suppliers

The ability to add POs to projects

To be accessible from head office, the panel shop and off-site staff

To be able to process multiple users on the system simultaneously

"We wanted something that would suit us"

After researching her software options Managing Director Julie Lawson concluded that PCS needed a bespoke purchasing system: “We wanted something that would suit us – we have two offices and a lot of people who work remotely, we wanted something that would work for everybody.”

Evergreen are perfectionists when it comes to getting a system just right for a business. With regard to the development process Julie said, “we changed things when we thought something would work and, if in practice it didn’t, Evergreen tweaked things until it did.”

Data cleaning and migration

Evergreen were able to extract all the old information from the MS Access database and clean up the data when issues were identified. Having the old data to hand meant PCS could stop using the old system as soon as the new system was fully tested and live.

Access for remote workers

One of the drawbacks to PCS’s old system was that it didn’t provide adequate insight. Julie told us that “Because a lot of deliveries are worldwide we needed something where centrally everybody could access the system.” Evergreen’s system makes things easier: “We’re quality QMS certified and it makes our checking process a lot easier. When we get an invoice we can look at the purchasing order and see that it’s been delivered.”

Julie has already asked Evergreen to continue working with them: “We have just asked Evergreen to add another feature which we thought would be useful. Some of the orders can be several pages long and we’ve introduced an all receipted button which makes things quicker”.